Do you feel stuck in your current rank? Are you unable to land your shots and other players usually win against you? We have a good news. Your aim and positional awareness can be improved by deliberate practice!

We are going to talk about techniques that you can use to improve your fine motoric skills with any character. Before we begin, a word of advice: you need to allocate time and keep doing these exercises to see results.

Being able to land your shots come with a lot of practice. Aiming in games is a fine motoric skill, and needs dedication to improve. This means that you can’t just sit down for 10 hours and practice in one session and see a lot of improvement.

In-game aim consistency

Before we dive into aim training here are some tips to help you with aim consistency. The following rituals can help you in staying more consistent, but may not need to be done for the full duration of the game. Do them for a while, let them help you in performing well.

Thinking ahead

The first tip here is about thinking forward in your games. There are a lot of situations where you are tired and just want to get into a game. This is hurting your performance, it is terribly hard to perform consistently if you are not paying attention to the game. The ritual that we suggest here is to pay attention to what is happening and use your skills to try to guess what is going to happen in the game. This skill is useful in itself, but if you pay attention to doing it, you tune in on your game more easily. Predict where the enemies will throw spam damage to, where they are going to move, who they are going to target, how will you need to react. Think ahead, make it your ritual.

Crosshair placement

The next one that helps with aim consistency is crosshair placement. Paying attention to crosshair placement at least at the beginning of a match will help you with more consistent aim and a better awareness of what is going on. These rituals work because they help you immersing yourself in the game, as they require your attention.

Focus and mental checklist

The last tip here is keeping your attention on the game. If you want to achieve consistency, you need to focus on what is going on in the game. To support awareness and focus, you can use a mental checklist to register every information about the happenings in the game. Using a mental checklist forms a habit of paying attention to a lot of things. Therefore it will help you in understanding what is going on in the game and making the right decisions. This helps in creating a good baseline for your performance in the given match.

Aim Practice in the Training Room

The training room is fine for learning the foundations of aiming with different Overwatch characters. You are repeating a set of exercises that build on each other and solidify your aim skills. Of course they are easy to do and may not really challenge you, but the point is that you get confident and experience the basics again and again for later improvement.

Aim Practice Against Bots

The next thing that a lot of people do to improve their aim in Overwatch is custom games against bots. There are different flavors to this, but the setup usually include headshot only against six Ana or Lucio bots. We recommend that you track your daily progress, so you can see your improvement and spot when you have reached your potential. When the stats stop raising for a week, then you know that you have reached your hard limit. Doing the practice after that point is to keep your aim sharp, not to improve it.

You may ask why are we even doing this practice against bots? We could just go in a live game and start shooting, right? Well, not exactly. When you are playing a live game, there are a lot of other things you are paying attention to. You are not repeating the same exercise again and again but do a lot of things at once. The focus is off. It is a lot better to just set time aside for practice and do the same drills again and again. This way you can improve at a more accelerated rate and you are going to be able to track your progress too.

Aim Training examples

Beginner level aim practice

Here is the entry level configuration that you can set up for practice: (Headshot only, skirmish, x6 hard ana bots in the enemy team, ilios map)

This kind of aim drill is better than the one in the practice range as the bots move around in a semi-random pattern and they have valid hitboxes. We are using Ana and Lucio for practice because their hitbox is small and they are hard to hit at first. The objective is to reach as high accuracy and as much kills as you can in 10 minutes. Don’t do longer sessions than that, as you are going to become tired and practice bad habits. Stay sharp during the drill and pay attention for the full duration.

Medium level aim practice

If you want a harder challenge, setup x2 Lucio and x4 Ana in the enemy team. This is a more advanced challenge with the same accuracy and killcount objectives. Lucios will use speed a lot, making it harder to hit them. Remember: 10 minutes per session, pay attention for the full duration.

Advanced level aim practice

For the advanced challenge, turn off the headshot only mode, add 6 Lucios in the enemy team and add 2 Lucios to your team. You now need to start dodging the enemy shots while concentrating on the same objective. This practice can actually be really hard and exhausting, but now you are using your aim in a pressured environment. The aim and movement that you learn here is easily transferable to live games.

You can start with any level, just make sure that you use the spaced repetition principle, and don’t overdo practice. Start right after this guide! Track your stats and try switching to a harder level when you feel you have reached a point where you can not improve further.

Aim Practice With Other Players

Shooting the AI can be really beneficial, but the best practice is against live enemies. Bots can become predictable, but players will give you a hard time even if you mastered the advanced level aim practice. There are two exercises that you can do.

Aim Based Custom Overwatch Games

Creating a custom game in the arcade with an emphasis on aiming can really take your skills to the next level. You can decide if you want to allow only a specific character or a set of characters. Just set up a game, make it public and players will come to challenge you! You can do this with any character, there usually are open games floating around with Hanzo, Widow and McCree headshot only configs.

This kind of practice is a lot of fun, and helps your raw aiming skills develop a lot. However it is not a real environment and enemies will make a lot of bad moves for kills. Try not to learn what they are doing, rather use your aim and movement to get the most kills and be the one dying the less. These are your objectives here. Remember, don’t overdo the practice, or you will be practicing bad habits!

1v1 games

The last aim and position exercise that we suggest doing is 1v1 games. You can use the dedicated 1v1 or setup a custom game with a buddy. 1v1 is really helpful because you can practice mirror matchups (for example a Tracer vs Tracer or Pharah vs Pharah) or situations that you find hard to win in 1v1, like McCree against Genji or Roadhog against Tracer. Both players can benefit from this kind of practice! Make sure that you discuss who does what and practice on different parts of the map, experiencing even ground and high ground advantage, etc.

We hope that you enjoyed this guide. If you did, make sure that you join our Discord server and ask your improvement related questions there. Also, you can become a part of a really cool community where everybody wants to help each other improve.

This article was created with the professional support ofOverwatchdojo

This guide is about securing your improvement by reviewing your game and learning from your losses. If you are doing the same mistakes again and again, we are going to explain how to overcome these obstacles and start climbing.

This guide is about securing your improvement by reviewing your game and learning from your losses. If you are doing the same mistakes again and again, we are going to explain how to overcome these obstacles and start climbing.